1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to an ink jet printer that ejects ink droplets to a recording medium and, more particularly, to an ink jet printer able to prevent the nozzles of a print head from drying by preliminarily ejecting ink from the nozzles before printing.
2. Description of Related Art
A conventional ink jet printer performs a maintenance operation termed flushing to recover the ink ejecting function of a print head whose nozzles have dried, by periodically moving the print head, prior to printing, to a position where a waste ink receiving portion is provided, and ejecting ink from all the nozzles of the print head to the waste ink receiving portion a predetermined number of times.
In the above-described ink jet printer, however, flushing is performed at regular intervals of time by ejecting ink a predetermined number of times, regardless of the length of time between previous flushing and a start of printing. Since flushing is performed by ejecting a predetermined number of times (for example, 500 times) even if the time elapsing between previous flushing and a start of printing is short so that the nozzles are still wet, the ink jet printer conventional printer has a drawback of a unnecessary consumption of ink.